The Last Tourist in Moncton

It was fall and on the face of things, it seemed like a good idea to leave my little cabin in the Cape Breton woods and head for a country with a warmer climate, like Guatemala, where it is always twenty-five degrees Celsius, even in February. So I got my second dose of Pfizer and bought a bus ticket from Port Hawkesbury to Moncton, thinking I would be able to fly out of Moncton International. Three-and-a-half hours later, I was standing at the Air Canada check-in counter being told that, in fact, I wouldn't be allowed to fly anywhere due to my second covid shot being only two days old, and it needing to be fourteen days old. I was, needless to say, dumbfounded and totally exhausted from having stayed awake most of the night before. But I had about seven hundred dollars, so I decided to take a taxi downtown and stay at the cheapest hotel I could find on hotels.com, a place called the Glory Inn B&B. I booked the room from the airport and got the taxi driver to drop me off at their front door. There was nobody in the office, only a sign that said, ''Please use side door!'' I rang the bell at the side door, but nobody came. There was, however, another sign with a number to call. I wrote the number down and spent the next hour looking for a pay phone. When I managed to find what seemed to be the only pay phone in downtown Moncton, I called the Glory Inn and got a Chinese woman who sounded like a little girl, but who was, in fact, an older woman. She told me to come by, and, in fifteen minutes, I was being checked-in in the most ridiculous manner imaginable. Mrs. Ying, or whatever her name was, made me fill out her check-in form wearing a mask and my glasses, without which I can't read anything. She kept telling me to pull my mask up every time it slipped down a little. I tried to tell her that I couldn't read the form with my mask pulled up because it was fogging up my glasses.